Hey there again! I had a question after the last post about chubs being the least sought after group. If you don't want to be liked because of your weight explicitly, do you really not have any options for dating and/or partnership statistically? Forgive me if my question is naive, I live in a small city in Kentucky with a very shallow gay population.

Gay men aren’t just shallow in Kentucky, Gay men are just shallow.

I haven’t really touched this topic because I have strong personal bias after being burned by people in the gay community for not meeting their superficial expectations; I have been turned down a lot because I’m too dark, skinny, short, not kinky enough, or too young. If they did find me attractive, they wouldn’t even befriend me unless we had sex first. (This might be why I have so few friends).

Just how shallow are gay men?

Only 10% of the census respondents said that looks don’t matter, the other 90% had strong preferences towards certain cliques. When I put this data into a matrix, we see that people who associate with a clique are mostly into other people in that clique. (Eg, if you identify as a Bear you are probably only into other Bears).

I wanted to know more about the 10% of gay men who didn’t care about looks, so I ran the numbers as if these men were their own clique…a clique that didn’t care about looks. We’ll call them turtles, after the animal that picks a mate for their personality.

Turtles are physically very average, though they are more likely to be bottoms. Geographically speaking, gays in the Mid-west care less about looks than the rest of America. However, the biggest indicator that someone doesn’t care about looks is if they don’t identify with any cliques. Nearly one-in-three people who doesn’t identify with a clique don’t care about looks.